2025-01-06 20:45:05| Engadget
Acer is a little late when it comes to releasing its first handheld gaming PC. But now at CES 2025, it seems like the company is trying to make up for lost time by going big. Really big. Thats because later this year, its planning to release a gigantic offering in the Nitro Blaze 11.
Packing detachable controllers and a built-in kickstand, the Blaze 11 shares a number of similarities with Lenovos Legion Go. However, when all that is attached to an 11-inch 2,560 x 1,600 IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness, the result is something that feels very different. In some ways, its almost like holding a steering wheel with a tablet-sized screen slammed in the middle along with your typical assortment of joysticks, face buttons and shoulder triggers on either side.
As youd expect from a device in this category, Acer has included some familiar gamer touches like RGB lighting surrounding analog sticks along with a new Acer Game Space app thats meant to serve as a one-stop game launcher and control panel for settings. In person, the Blaze 11s screen is bright and vivid to the point that I had to confirm that it wasnt OLED. You also get whats becoming a fairly standard set of ports: two USB-C, a 3.5mm audio jack and a microSD card slot. That said, I do appreciate that Acer found room for a USB-A port, which brings the total number of USB connections to three.
Meanwhile, on the inside, the Blaze 11s specs look good, though not especially impressive, with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS chip and Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB of RAM (7500 MT/s) and up to 2TB of SSD storage (though Acer says initial configurations will come with 512GB).
That said, if an 11-inch gaming tablet seems a bit too unwieldy, Acer does have a second option in the Nitro Blaze 8. It features nearly identical specs and a very similar design minus the detachable controllers and kickstand, but with a smaller 8-inch IPS screen that has a slightly faster 144Hz refresh rate. Both models felt solid, though the Blaze 8 does win out in overall rigidity thanks to its non-detachable controllers. In case thats not enough, theres actually a third handheld that will be joining Acers ranks in the Nitro Blaze 7, which was announced back in September but has yet to go on sale (at least in the US).
Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
My one concern with the Blaze 11 is that while it seems totally serviceable, Im not quite sure its gigantic dimensions alone will be enough to carve out a significant niche among rivals from ASUS, Lenovo, Valve and others, as it lacks much in the way of additional defining characteristics. That said, I did notice that the bottom of the Blaze 11 features pogo pins that suggests some peripherals (most likely a dock) will arrive at a later date. However, when I asked an Acer representative for confirmation, they said they had no official announcements regarding additional peripherals or accessories for the Blaze family at this time.
Acer says all three handhelds will go on sale sometime in Q2 2025, with the Nitro Blaze 11 starting at $1,100, the Blaze 8 at $900 and somewhere around $800 for the Blaze 7.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/the-acer-nitro-blaze-11-is-an-absolutely-massive-handheld-gaming-pc-194505881.html?src=rss
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